Atlantis
THREE TALES
Samuel R. Delany
For
Iva Hacker-Delany,
John R. Keene, Jr.,
and
Dennis Rickett
Note to the reader
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ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924
Distinctly praise the years…
— HART CRANE, “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”
a
It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks.
I.
Skyscrapers — that’s what he was most eager to see. But before entering the city the train dropped between earthen walls tangled with winter trees, the dirt sometimes becoming out the window, for hundreds of feet, concrete.
II.
The tallest building in the world was in New York — the Wool-worth Building. Most people knew that; but he knew, counting basements and sub-basements, the Woolworth had exactly sixty stories — and not many people knew that.
III.
Bring such information out at the right time, and people said, “What a smart boy!” which made up a little for the guilt he felt over his school grades: they’d been bad enough to silence Papa —
IV.
recently elected bishop — and make Mama cry. Finally they’d decided to let him leave (clearly school was doing him no good) and come north to stay with his brother. Sam’s toes felt sticky in his socks.
V.
Last night, he’d decided not to take his shoes off, afraid his feet might smell. This morning, however, though he’d already gone into the little bathroom with its metal walls to wash his face and hands,
VI.
nothing about him felt fresh. Stretching, he arched his back, pulled his fists against his chest; the noblet of flesh on the left side — one male, milkless teat — caught a thread or fold in his shirt,
pulling till it cut.
He sat forward quickly, trying to look disinterested, waiting for the soreness to fall from his chest. A minute on, when he sat back, cambric brushed him: the sensitivity had become, surprisingly, pleasant. Again, he felt himself shift within his wool trousers. Insistently alert to his body, sensual and stale under cloth, he glanced around the car — especially at the women in their seats, black and white, beginning to arrange themselves.
Five times now he’d noticed, first with distress, then with curiosity, and finally with indifference, that if he sat on the rumbling plush, relaxed, and let his knees fall wide, through loose wool the train’s joggling gave him an erection.
Pulling his knees together, he sat back again and arched his fingers on the cushion, so that blue nap slipped under his nails. (Amidst the wheels’ cacophony, Sam could hear a “…tut-tut-tut-tut-tut…” just like the song.) The first joints of his fingers (and his toes — but people didn’t see those) had grown too much: tall as he was, the initial joints had clubbed into those of someone even bigger. Digitus clavigerae, or something like it, his oldest brother, Lemuel, had said it was called. Not that that made him feel any better about it. Youngest child, lightest child (hair once cornsilk pale before puberty had turned it rough and red — and adolescence darkened it further), a surprise child, Mama had called him. Mama’s pet, the others said, which, while sometimes it held their ire, now had become a term of fondness — for most of them, most of the time. But he was the one among the ten who hadn’t finished high school. Well, when he’d worked awhile in New York and grown more serious, the older ones could settle him into night school and help him toward a diploma. That’s what Papa said; and since she always listened to Papa, Mama said he could go. And see the skyscrapers.
On either bank — Sam slid from one seat, moved across the aisle, and into another, to peer by purple tassels — against November gray, filigreed branches separated wooden houses, one and two drab stories.
Watching the dawnscape, still iceless, flip along, he contemplated for the thousandth time the astonishing process by which the seamless and inexorable progression of the present slipped away to pack the past with memories, like numbered stanzas in a song, like cells in a comb, like cakes in a carton, to be called back (though, he’d already ascertained, most he’d never recall) in whatever surprising, associative order.
There’d been, he remembered now, that poor-white family with the six children the white conductor had brought into the Jim Crow car last night and, after looking around, settled — with their twine-tied boxes and traveling baskets — in the three rows of seats at the car’s head. “If you all want to sit together, this is about the best we can do.” One of the girls and two of the boys had been barefoot, just as if it were summer. “In a couple of hours you all could come in here anyway.” The father’s coat had been out at both elbows and his hair stuck straight down from under his straw hat in blond blades. Holding the shoulder of his mother’s sweater, with a fall of silver silk over each ear and eyes like circles cut from gingham, above the seat back the littlest stared at all the car’s dark faces, to fix finally — pink lips lax in a thoughtless ‘o’—on Sam, four seats behind and across the aisle, as if Sam, and not they, were the anomaly here. Sam had slid his fingers under his thighs.
But why did that make him remember, how many days before, Lewy, arguing with — well, discussing with — Mama, in an extraordinarily grown-up manner, how going north would be good for him — while Sam sat, silent, impressed, across the kitchen table, listening to them go on earnestly for fifteen minutes, as though he weren’t there.
For moments Sam thought again about the memory he didn’t have — because he’d dozed through it: that moment, on leaving Washington, when the Jim Crow car in which he’d started out had become a car like any other, along with all the white cars on the train; and he and anyone in it could sit anywhere they wanted. Immediately on waking, with half a dozen others already up and collecting things, though it was after one o’clock in the morning, he’d gotten his two cases and moved. Sprawled against each other, the white man and the barefoot children slept on. Beside the biggest boy, who wore shoes like his parents, the white woman gazed at the black window. At her shoulder, the blue-eyed child stared up, as Sam pushed, sideways, by.